Statelessness, Detention Centres, and the Otherisation characteristics of the ‘citizen’ are retained. 53 The exclusion of the ‘illegal immigrants’ (claimed to be Bangladeshi Muslims), performed in the name of the NRC, works well with the current Government’s idea of Akhand Bharat (undivided India) which includes territories of Pakistan and Bangladesh. 54 While they would be included territorially within undivided India, they would be expelled owing to their otherness (non-Hindu). It is then that the paradox of the visuals takes central stage. The public spectacle of indefinite detention allows the state to put up a show of deterrence while making the stateless invisible and removing them from the public view. In the backdrop of the NRC, the detention of citizens because of the failure to document their citizenship takes away their status as a political right-bearing person and hides the violence perpetrated against them. With the establishment of the detention camps, the state asserts its control over the borders by maintaining the grip over actual bodies. Building on Agamben’s conception of the ‘camps as the site of exception’, the detention camps produce and present the declared foreigners as a danger from which the community must be protected. 55 The exceptionalism of the state of affairs requires suspension of the rights-based legal order to safeguard the interests of the nation-state and leads to the legitimation of the Other as a target. In the camp, there is a collapse of the distinction between human and non-human. It is where the state, through its control over the ‘bare life’, manages life and death as an everyday statistical affair. 56 In a 2019 statement, the Indian Home Minister called illegal immigrants’ ‘termites’ and vowed to throw them in the Bay of Bengal, which reflects the continuous exposure to death under the command of the sovereign. 57 The insensitivity and incoherence prevailing within the Government machinery in understanding the nuances of statelessness were aptly called out by a mourning relative in Assam. 58 The family of the deceased refused to accept the body of an individual who was declared a foreigner and died in detention. They asked the Government to send the body to Bangladesh. This act of acquisition of nationality on death in contrast to when alive highlights the paradox and the anxiety furthered through law. While Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘rights to have rights’ is popularly viewed as the catchphrase for the refugees, it must be understood that it speaks for all those who have been marginalised within the society and are unable to speak on their own. 59 The problem of statelessness is only removed with the assumption of a valid legal national identity. Thus, in the absence of the recognition of such a 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 Sundhya Pahuja, ‘The Postcoloniality of International Law’ (2005) 46(2) Harvard International Law Journal 459, 461. Rimple Mehta, ‘“Illegal” Bangladeshis in Akhand Bharat: Inscriptions of Race and Religion on Citizenship’ (2018) 53(7) Economic and Political Weekly 62, 66. Agamben (n 50); Amy O’Donoghue, ‘Sovereign Exception: Notes on the Thought of Giorgio Agamben’ Critical Legal Thinking (online, 2 July 2015) <https://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/07/02/sovereign-exception-notes-on-the-thought-ofgiorgio-agamben/>. Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY Press, 2013) 91. Devjyot Ghoshal, ‘Amit Shah Vows to Throw Illegal Immigrants into Bay of Bengal’, Reuters (online, 12 April 2019) <https://www.reuters.com/article/india-election-speech/amit-shahvows-to-throw-illegal-immigrants-into-bay-of-bengal-idUSKCN1RO1YD>. Abdul Gani, ‘Twenty-six Deaths In Assam's Detention Centres Magnify Fallacy Of NRC Exercise, But Who Cares’, Outlook (online, 4 November 2019) <https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/india-news-twenty-six-deaths-in-assamsdetention-centres-magnify-fallacy-of-nrc-exercise-but-who-cares/302284>. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian Books, 1958) 296–7. 265